


Then they took everything away (from me)

by JuniorWoofles



Series: the sky opened up and down poured the pain - 4.22 Codas [2]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 04, Will the writers let Jake and Amy be together for once?, Yes I know I should have finished this weeks ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 02:38:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12098874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuniorWoofles/pseuds/JuniorWoofles
Summary: Amy still dreams. Her dreams didn't magically disappear when Jake did but now there isn't the same joy in dreaming. Dreaming used to remind her of childhood - of childish innocence and freedom. It was like flying out of her body and becoming someone else for a little bit without consequence or reason. But now, although waking still reminds her that she's alive and that she has a big day ahead, it doesn't come to her like a gentle rousing but rather like all the wind has been knocked out of her. There's joy in dreaming but the real nightmare comes when she wakes up alone when minutes ago she wasn't. Now she dreams of Jake.*can be read as a stand alone in the series*





	Then they took everything away (from me)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Bremen' by PigPen Theater Company.
> 
> I wrote more season 4 angst so here you go *hands it out*

Amy still dreams. Her dreams didn't magically disappear when Jake did but now there isn't the same joy in dreaming. Dreaming used to remind her of childhood - of childish innocence and freedom. It was like flying out of her body and becoming someone else for a little bit without consequence or reason. But now, although waking still reminds her that she's alive and that she has a big day ahead, it doesn't come to her like a gentle rousing but rather like all the wind has been knocked out of her. There's joy in dreaming but the real nightmare comes when she wakes up alone when minutes ago she wasn't.

Amy still dreams. But it's not sword fighting and imaging what Paris would be like or dreaming of floating with tropical fishes or imaging she’s a caught under piles of paperwork. She dreams of Jake.

At night when exhaustion catches up with her and forces her to shut her eyes she'll sleep and Jake will be there and just for a little while the world doesn't hurt anymore.

There is joy only to be found in the tiny corners of her mind that she doesn't dare search through while she's awake. All of the happiness of the Jake memories, and even the Rosa memories and the memories of the Precinct as it was, are tinged by too much pain to be viewed during the day. She can't think of what she had or what they had or what they lost because the knowledge that once again the Precinct was torn apart, ripped from its heart and left to bleed out, is too much for her to process on top of the job she currently still has.

Amy knows she feels it the most. Even Charles knows her pain outweighs his, even though pain is pain and they shouldn't be comparing or trying to one up each other. They're not but there's a look in Charles’ eyes when he looks at Amy now that tells her that he thinks she's hurting most.

She probably is. She doesn't know about Pimento but he's not the most emotional. Whereas Amy wears her pain like a bandage around her heart, a constant burden that does more harm than good. She needs to stop thinking of the past so the bandage can come off and the wound will heal.

Either that or her heart would crumble into nothingness at the mere idea that Amy Santiago is giving up.

There is pain in her world now. There is a sadness in the air at the precinct, at their favourite date restaurant, at their rooftop the one time she tried to go back, at her apartment, in her kitchen and on the couch and in the bedroom and on the bed. It's a crushing sadness and it's suffocating.

When she dreams there is less pain. There is Jake and where there is Jake there is happiness.

Some dreams are a Jake fuelled haze. It's like strolling down half memories and catching only fragments of it. She makes out all she can, trying so hard to sustain the picture of Jake smiling softly at her but in trying to preserve it she loses it.

She's tired of losing Jake.

She loses Jake in her dreams sometimes. When she has nightmares and wakes up with tears drying down her cheeks. All she sees is his face falling with the gavel and a stream of coolcoolcoolcoolcool that is as fast as the thudding of her heart.

It's one of the strongest memories she has. She doesn't know if it's because it's the last one. She doesn't want to know if it's because it's the last one. She doesn't want to think about what that means.

Instead she'll fish out a ratty old jumper that still smells like Jake and bury her face into it until she feels asleep again and Dream Jake is there to stroke her hair back and whisper nonsense in her ear until she cracks a small smile and forgets that she's only dreaming.

In her dreams her Jake is there for her, as he should be. As he would be, she reminds herself sometimes, if the universe wasn't so cruel as to take him away from her again.

She dreamt once that he never came back from the Mafia. That they never became Jake And Amy. That all they had ever been was Jake and Amy, partners and maybe sometimes friends. She woke up shaking and spent the next night at Charles’ house. Nikolaj’s breathing carried through to the living room where she had insisted on sleeping and soothes her to sleep.

That night her Jake is Her Jake again, as he should be. There is no mob and no Mafia to steal him away but the memory of it is there in a story he tells her. She remembers the story. Not the words or the point of it but the domesticity and absurdity of having Jake Peralta give her a foot massage as he told a story about Billy Joel karaoke and Rites of passage.

Charles smiles sadly at her when she wakes up and with the memory still fresh in her mind she is able to send him a small smile in return.

She doesn't smile as much anymore. They all understand. No one says anything about it. She isn't the only one who lost the will to laugh.

She thanks Charles for his couch and even Genevieve hugs her extra tight when she leaves. Amy’s never been close to Genevieve but she gives good hugs. Amy wonders if Charles yearns for Jake in the same bone deep ache that she does. She wonders if Charles imagines what it would be like if his best friend was still here. They'd be working on the same case right now, not Charles and the replacement. (That's all Amy can bring herself to call him. Holt never makes her work with the guy so she's grateful for that. She's not sure how she would be around not-Jake). Maybe Jake would have figured out Charles’ case by now. Or maybe Rosa had a piece of random personal knowledge that would surprise both no one and everyone that would be relevant. Maybe not having two ghosts would make their Precinct work better again. (CJ never cared but no one was at their best while Jake and Holt were in Florida. Maybe CJ thought that was there best but he hadn't seen them under Holt. He hadn't seen the 99 at its peak).

Amy wants to ask Charles how much he misses Jake but she doesn't have the words. She doesn't need them. It's written in his face when he comes over to hand her paperwork and he's unable to avoid looking at Jake's desk. He always looks straight back at her, maybe to try and see if she noticed he did so. Amy always notices. She's always looking at the desk. The only way to not look at Jake's desk is to look at files and papers. If she works hard enough she'll forget Jake won't be around to bring her coffee or shake her out of her stupor or help her with a case or bug her when he's bored. It's not enough but it helps.

(Holt had sat her down the day After and told her she wouldn't be able to move the desk. It was the most direct thing he'd said to her about the situation and he didn't say anything else to it. Told her simply, and with a note of dejected kindness, that she couldn't move the desk and that was all, thank you, Santiago. As she left she heard a sigh that sounded like he wanted to be able to tell her to move the desk and everything else and that he'll get Terry and together the three of them will move all of the desks so it doesn't feel like there's ghosts but he didn't. She shut the door and walked past the offending desk and came back ten minutes later with red rimmed eyes. Someone had put coffee on her desk during that time).

So Amy works, her shifts and any and all other shift she can pick up. She needs to keep busy, keep her mind busy so she doesn't just sit with bad $8 wine drink and cry her heart out while planning the most effective way to kill Hawkins. She works and comes home and works on her side project. It's in a big file labelled Homecoming and designed to look like a scrapbook. The first page is a picture of her and Jake from the Boyle-Linetti wedding, then one from the Bet date and then from the last night of the cruise. After that page is detailed accounts, dates and numbers and figures and graphs and photographs and anything else she can get her hands on that might get Jake home. It's not enough, not nearly enough and she wonders how many scrapbooks she'll have to fill before she'll have enough to get them out. She wants to get them both home. They belong at home, in the Precinct with their family and those they love.

Amy wonders about Pimento sometimes and does nothing about it.

She wrote a postcard once, within a week when the pain was freshest, but it's hard to read with tear splotches over her words and with the lack of an address to send it to she stuck it into the scrapbook instead.

She had a dream once that Pimento is a wild bear walking from the forest and just as he's able to get to the prison tower Rosa is kept in the dark wizard Hawkins cuts him down.

She didn't get much sleep the night after that.

She had a dream where Hawkins was a dementor who locked Jake in Azkaban. She watched in horror as the life was sucked out of Jake and there was nothing she could do about it.

She woke up shaking after that one, like she had had a panic attack. Maybe she had. It felt like panic that was crawling up her throat and forcing her to run to her bathroom, shivering and panting until she slumped against the floor and managed an hour of dreamless sleep. Sometimes in her dreams it is different. Sometimes her dreams are not memories but what ifs. What would x be if y was changed. The what ifs make her tear her hair out in frustration and throw her mugs around. All of them have chips now.

She cradled the remains of one while she cried once. She didn't realise until after she threw it that it was one of Jake's. Everything had felt like theirs but now it's firmly Amy’s things and Jake's things again.

She wonders if it'll ever be theirs again.

In her dreams she loses Jake to the Mafia and to Sophia and to Figus.

In her dreams she watches as Sophia breaks his heart and watches as someone else puts it together. In her dreams she stands at his wedding. She's blonde and pretty but her face is obscured by a veil.

In her dreams they were never Johnny and Dora.

In her dreams she sticks to her rule of not dating cops after Teddy.

Or she marries Teddy. It’s a boring, everyday repetitive kind of life filled with Pilsners. It’s bland; like cheap vanilla compared with new rocky road with popping candy.

In her dreams Pimento never came home. There wasn't a wedding she had to put together in a day and there wasn't Jake's proud face when he kissed her and called her babe.

There is a dream where Jake never once calls her babe. She hates that thought most because although she hated pet names and rarely used them, babe was _theirs._ And anything that was theirs was special.

There is a dream where Jenny Gildenhorn dances with Jake at the Boyle-Linetti wedding and it's all he's ever wanted since he was thirteen and he doesn't see Amy’s heart stopped beating the second Jake swept Jenny up in his arms.

She dreams that she's still in Texas a lot. Sometimes Jake is there pulling her along corridors or admitting he loves her too much to watch her do her job. Other times she has Charles. Usually she's alone with a pillow under her dress and her heart in her mouth as she approaches Moira Figus.

She dreamt once that she never came home from Texas. She was there while Jake was in Florida and he felt even further away from her than he had. She screamed out for him when she felt dream Moira punch her when they both found out.

The worst nightmare she has, second only to thoughts of never being able to see Jake again and being his would-be widow and the real life one she walks in, is one where she wins the bet. It's the scariest thought, how that one thing was the turning point. The impasse they had stood at for a year turned out to be Y-junction with one fork that led to the Jake and Amy life while the other led to her Jake And Amy life. She dreams that she wins and takes his car and that's the end of it. There's no one dollar ring or terrible dresses and no steerage dance from _Titanic_ and there's no rooftop stakeout. There's no nut bag and no robbers who think they're together already. There's no chance for Jake to start to fall in love with her if he can't throw peanuts at her face.

Or maybe there is. But she was going to drive his lucky car in the dirt. Maybe if she had his car he wouldn't have paid his debt to Terry. Maybe Jake wouldn't be Ava’s godfather.

Maybe maybe maybe. Sometimes Amy dreams in maybes.

She has a dream that's her favourite, most ridiculous fantasy because it feels like she's winning. In it she's a knight and she's brave and she's powerful and she takes down the deadly dragon who is keeping her family from her. This is her fairy tale. This is her _Lord of the Rings_ moment. This is her happy ending.

Her happy dreams consist of Jake and lazy smiles and soft filtered sunlight. He is there when she wakes up. He is home and he's not leaving her again, not for anything in the world. There's a ring on her finger that wasn't there before and there's life growing in her that's going to be half-Jake and half-Amy. She can already picture Charles cheering and celebrating after Jake tells him. He'd be sworn to secrecy and spill five seconds later, shouting it out to the whole Precinct. They wouldn't care because it's Charles and it's just who Charles is and he's Jake's best friend and he's been wanting this from the moment they got together. Terry looks like he'll cry from happiness but he'll keep insisting he's fine and he'll pull them into a ginger but tight bear hug.

Rosa says something deadpan and snarky but they'll be a smile on her face as wide as when she caught the Giggle Pig suppliers and she'll hug them both.

Gina screams at them both. Loudly and with the intent to embarrass them both she starts spouting a mile a minute about pregnancy related things she experienced and demanding to take Amy out shopping.

Hitchcock and Scully are denied hugs due to food stains but they hug each other and don't seem put off in the slightest about that.

Holt will smile at them. Of course he will. Jake is his son and she's his mentee and he'll show pride in his Holt way. Maybe that's a smile. He probably won't cry again. Probably.

In her dreams Jake kisses her growing belly and smiles wider than she thought possible.

In her dreams Jake holds her hand as they buy baby clothes.

In her dreams Jake calls Charles to build their crib after they swear at the Ikea box for an hour.

In her dreams Jake cried when he holds his son.

In her dreams Jake is happy and she is at peace.

In her dreams there is no Hawkins, no prison bars and visiting hours, no pain and suffering and piles of documents  of questionable legality lining the walls of her apartment. In her dreams there is soft morning kisses and jokes at work and candlelit dinners and morning sickness and a bundle of joy that doesn't know how to eat without throwing his food back at them. In her dreams Holt and Kevin babysit when they take two days to go to Paris. In her dreams Gina has an endless supply of baby clothes to pass on. In her dreams she can see Rosa helping her son to walk, his little chubby hand held in hers, all the same save for a longed for wedding ring now sitting on the left hand. In her dreams Terry warns their son away from Ava and glares when Jake makes an incest joke. In her dreams Nikolaj plays cars with their son despite the age gap while they try to drink some weird tea combination Charles found.

In her dreams her family is whole again. In her dreams her family is not only together but growing. In her dreams Rosa Pimento smiles a little when you say her name and laughs when she's drunk. In Amy’s dreams Rosa gets her happy ending that she too has been denied.

In her dreams she has Jake. Not just a fabricated memory of him but the real genuine article. He comes home, _home,_ to her and they're together and it's enough. It is as it should be.

But that is only in her dreams, when Amy wishes and yearns for Jake in a way she will not allow herself to do during the day. It is only her in dreams. In reality nothing was as it should be. The cops tried to do the wrong thing and failed and got themselves thrown in with the criminals they were framed as. In the real world Jake Peralta sleeps alone on a metal bed, Rosa Diaz beats her fists bloody trying to feel like everything isn't useless, Ray Holt no longer sleeps the required hours of sleep for a healthy adult, Charles Boyle doesn't smile like he used to, Terry Jeffords shouts more at work and is quiet at home, Scully and Hitchcock eat in somber silence most days, Gina Linetti cries to her baby when no one's around, Adrian Pimento hasn't returned from Argentina - no one thinks he will until Rosa is able to go out to him - and Amy Santiago curls up on a bed that's suddenly too cold and too big and draws battle plans until she can't see anymore out of rage and sorrow. In the real world, where things panned out as they did, there is a lack of hope and happiness that seeps into the air, stretching out the days and the nights until they blur into each other and true happiness begins to feel like a distant memory that they'll never be able to reclaim. There used to be happiness in the waking life but now the nightmares stalk the sun and dreams are only memories of a happiness that no longer exists.

**Author's Note:**

> This is now part of a series but you don't have to read every part of the series as it can be read as a stand alone. There are two more parts to this series that I will post before the season 5 premiere.  
> Kudos and comments etc make me edit faster, so thank you to anyone who takes the time to leave some.


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